IAPR TC11 Newsletter
November 5, 2005
http://www.iapr-tc11.org
Special Edition in Memory of Dr Adnan Amin
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Dear colleagues,
We have just received the extremely sad news of Dr Adnan Admin's unexpected passing away on Friday, October 28, 2005. Adnan was a well respected and distinguished member of our community and a past Chair of TC11. He will be sorely missed by all of us. In this special edition we would like to share with you some thoughts written by his close friend Prof Abdel Belaïd and
Prof Jean-Paul Haton who was the PhD Advisor of both.
In memoriam Adnan Amin
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On Friday morning, October 28, 2005, Dr Adnan Amin passed away. Given his health and good-nature at ICDAR in Seoul, South Korea, last summer, this comes to us as a complete and sad surprise.
Adnan Amin was a senior lecturer in School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Among his many research activities, Dr Adnan Amin was an Editorial Board member and Program Committee member of many conferences and journals in our research domain, including the ICDAR conferences and the journal IJDAR.
Adnan Amin was for a long time our colleague in LORIA lab and a good friend in life. One of us (Abdel) started with Adnan the research on handwriting recognition using structural approaches for Arabic and Latin writing, whereas the second (Jean-Paul) was the supervisor of the Doctorat d’Etat Thesis that he presented on this topic in December 1985. After his departure of Nancy, initially to Kuwait, then to Australia (forced by what happened in Middle East), we had never ceased seeing each other and corresponding. His friendliness, generosity and good-nature are legendary. Like each one among us, we have an unforgettable memory of the various meetings with him.
Some of you will know his wife Hiyam who is doing a PhD in Empirical Software Engineering. On behalf of all friends and colleagues, we offer Hiyam and her children our most heartfelt condolences, and our support in any way that we can help at this time.
Adnan was a pioneer on Arabic recognition, he developed IRAC, the first system for off-line Arabic recognition. By this élan, he gave to many researchers the desire to deepen this research area. That explains the numerous citations to his work.
Adieu Adnan! Repose en paix.
Abdel Belaïd and Jean-Paul Haton
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Dr. Jianying Hu, IAPR-TC11 Chair
jyhu@us.ibm.com
Dr. Apostolos Antonacopoulos, IAPR-TC11 Vice Chair
A.Antonacopoulos@salford.ac.uk